the way i found out about this site. well i will start at the begining. i was in a book store and a saw a sudoku book. i did not know what i was at the time. the title looked cool so i looked at it. the next day i saw a puzzle in the paper. i solved it. the paper had a web site on it www.sudoku.org.uk i went there. one day i typed in sudoku.com and then i found this site. i saw it had a forum so i joined it.

I had been solving the Daily Mail's Codenumber puzzle for 5 months and was under the impression that, like their Codeword puzzle, it was peculiar to them, when I had occasion to go to the airport.

I was killing time whilst waiting for a flight to come in when I spotted the Times Book 1, which clearly stated that the puzzle was called Sudoku. I felt that at £5.99 it was a touch expensive for the size of the book but my curiosity (and utter boredom, you know what airports are like and the flight was delayed by 1 hour - not enough time to go home and too long to wait) overcame any financial concerns that I had and I bought it, took it to the nearest coffee-shop and that's where my addiction really took hold (I'd like to add that although I have yet to finish the book I have had more than £5.99 worth of fun out of it).

Hmm, I honestly don't remember for sure how I ended up here, but I think it went a bit like this; I started playing some puzzles online (websudoku.com, if I recall correctly), but I was quickly bitten by the programming bug (as always), and as I googled around for more info on solving techniques, I stumbled across the Advanced Solving Techniques forum here.

I remember whimpering with fear when I was reading about Nice Loops and Forcing Chains for the first time. I think I'm getting there, though, albeit slowly. (That's a nice advantage of programming a solver, by the way; You *have to* understand a technique to add support for it. So I'm constantly learning.)

For myself, I think (it was a long time ago), that there must have been a website address in the Times newspaper when they first introduced Sudoku to the peoples of Britain. Having piqued my interest, I would have visited this site.

Actually, I don't recall the price of carparking, consequently it couldn't have been that bad. Roughly around the price it would be to park in the city centre for a whole day, and it was around 3 hours all told. It was still less than the price of a taxi from the airport, which is why I was there.

The short story, through Google. I was searching for another Shogun Sudoku after the one I had found on the TimesOnline site, which brought up a forum post from this site.

The long story, I was on a train somewhere between London and Edinburgh, saw it in a paper someone left behind as I was looking to make another sorry attempt at a crossword puzzle, found sudoku pretty easy to pick up, and proceeded to solve every puzzle I could find. I even created my own puzzle, though at the time, I didnt even notice there was a symmetry with the starting numbers left shown, so when I gave it to my brother to solve, there were too many unknowns leading to too many possible paths to take.

Once back home, Google found me a downloadable sudoku game, which expired after a month, during which time I got a friend at work hooked on the game and he was registered on the TimesOnline site which provided another source, and after which is when I found websudoku.com which is also unlimited play.

This brings it back to the short story, which only happened this month.